Twenty Years Since NAFTA: Mexico Could Have Done Worse, But It’s Not Clear How (click here)
Mark Weisbrot | January 4, 2014 | CEPR
It was 20 years ago that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico was implemented. Here in Washington, D.C., the date coincided with an outbreak of the bacteria cryptosporidium in the city’s water supply, with residents having to boil their water before drinking it. The joke in town was, “See what happens, NAFTA takes effect and you can’t drink the water here.”
Our neglected infrastructure aside, it is easy to see that NAFTA was a bad deal for most Americans. The promised trade surpluses with Mexico turned out to be deficits, some hundreds of thousands of jobs were lost, and there was downward pressure on U.S. wages – which was, after all, the purpose of the agreement. This was not like the European Union’s (pre-eurozone) economic integration, which allocated hundreds of billions of dollars of development aid to the poorer countries of Europe so as to pull their living standards up toward the average. The idea was to push U.S. wages downward, toward Mexico’s, and to create new rights for corporations within the trade area: these lucky multinational enterprises could now sue governments directly before a corporate-friendly international tribunal, unaccountable to any national judicial system, for regulations (e.g. environmental) that infringed upon their profit-making potential....
A few things. The USA has been absorbing the economic pressures of countries with cheap labor while their elite pump out a foreign brain trust that exceeds the current status of the USA. The downward pressure on pay to Americans has resulted in a lower rate of taxes to the US Treasury.
The USA National Debt is a result of being a sponge to other nation's entry into the global economy. These nations have feed off the US economy while it accumulated incredible debt. Basically, the US National Debt was accommodated while other nations, such as China, fed their economies without improving their citizen's quality of life or developing their Middle Class. Without the debt of the US, China would never have achieved an economy at all. That is also true of India.
Differently put, the USA buoyed those growing economies while provided loans to maintain the cash flow. The USA borrowed back it's loss of economic growth so it could be further exploited.
The only way the USA is guaranteed it's economic growth is to grow it's local economies. It is it's only protection from becoming Third World as the other global economies drags it down to that level. Any Wall Street economy has no conscience. The problem is that the Right Wing of the political USA doesn't either. The assault against The Voting Rights Act proves that. It is unconscionable there are states exempt from federal law. I don't even think it is constitutional. The Voting Rights Act as it is accepted today, allows States Rights by CERTAIN states while federal law is imposed on all others. It won't stand the test of lawsuits.
But as to the TPP, it will serve to undermine the very bailouts the USA made in 2008 to sustain their domestic car industry. It is a definitive threat to the USA economy and might even be the final blow to it's stability. There are some nations that see that as a strategic victory. The more domesticated the USA economy the more the stable it will remain.
The TPP doesn't recognize the decency of the USA in providing assistance in developing these nations, except, for copyrights in intellectual property. The TPP just dives in and seeks to remove any and all protections between nations. The cheap labor market will be more evident than ever.
...the leaked copies of the Intellectual Property chapter of the TPP suggests. Copyrights and patents created over the past century, so very many in film, music, pharmaceuticals and computer software by US companies will have enhanced protection, if the agreement is signed....
There will be tragic complications in the USA because of these dynamics. As the cost of labor is oppressed by the TPP, the cost of items protected by copyright will remain at higher costs than if there copyrights were allowed to expire as USA law dictates. The Pharmaceutical Industry will benefit from this the most while suspending the 'downward cost curve' on USA health care. It doesn't matter if there is a health care bill, the cost will remain primarily unchanged because of this provision.
Differently put, the USA buoyed those growing economies while provided loans to maintain the cash flow. The USA borrowed back it's loss of economic growth so it could be further exploited.
The only way the USA is guaranteed it's economic growth is to grow it's local economies. It is it's only protection from becoming Third World as the other global economies drags it down to that level. Any Wall Street economy has no conscience. The problem is that the Right Wing of the political USA doesn't either. The assault against The Voting Rights Act proves that. It is unconscionable there are states exempt from federal law. I don't even think it is constitutional. The Voting Rights Act as it is accepted today, allows States Rights by CERTAIN states while federal law is imposed on all others. It won't stand the test of lawsuits.
But as to the TPP, it will serve to undermine the very bailouts the USA made in 2008 to sustain their domestic car industry. It is a definitive threat to the USA economy and might even be the final blow to it's stability. There are some nations that see that as a strategic victory. The more domesticated the USA economy the more the stable it will remain.
The TPP doesn't recognize the decency of the USA in providing assistance in developing these nations, except, for copyrights in intellectual property. The TPP just dives in and seeks to remove any and all protections between nations. The cheap labor market will be more evident than ever.
...the leaked copies of the Intellectual Property chapter of the TPP suggests. Copyrights and patents created over the past century, so very many in film, music, pharmaceuticals and computer software by US companies will have enhanced protection, if the agreement is signed....
There will be tragic complications in the USA because of these dynamics. As the cost of labor is oppressed by the TPP, the cost of items protected by copyright will remain at higher costs than if there copyrights were allowed to expire as USA law dictates. The Pharmaceutical Industry will benefit from this the most while suspending the 'downward cost curve' on USA health care. It doesn't matter if there is a health care bill, the cost will remain primarily unchanged because of this provision.
Professor John Jackson, (click here) of the University of Michigan Law School, once suggested that international trade negotiations operated under the bicycle principal. Put simply: ‘If you're not moving forward you are probably falling off’.’ And, to take the example of the World Trade Organisation’s progress over the past decade, little forward motion is really needed.
But a recent article in The Age, ‘How China’s know-how is challenging the US’, suggests previously unrecognised factors may have spurred the US' entry into the negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement.
The article, by Dr Thomas Barlow, tells the story of the decline in innovation in the west, and, in particular, the USA.
Barlow observes that “for more than half a century, the US has been the dominant force in global innovation”.
“For years, its intensity of investment in knowledge – estimated by totting up spending on software, R&D, and higher education as a share of GDP – has been twice that of Europe.”
One consequence is that “in the second half of the 20th century, 58 per cent of the world's Nobel Laureates were resident in the US”.
But, as he observes, “there is a zone of nations extending from Japan, China, and South Korea in the north, down to Singapore, Indonesia, Australia, and New Zealand in the south” whose “combined R&D investment in all sectors, public and private, zone exceeded that in North America for the first time” in 2011.
In addition “in 2009, total patent applications made through the patent co-operation treaty process from applicants in these nations also exceeded those from North American applicants for the first time”.
It’s uncanny that around the same time the US opted to participate in the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement....
The previous administration started the TPP during their two terms. This is supposed to proceed to end without interruption. Why would the USA consent to a treaty that caused it's citizens harm? The track record of the Bush/Cheney administration in valuing profits over human life and American's quality of life is well known.
The pharmaceutical company had recently raised the price of this drug by 400%: The maker of the drug, Abbott, “raised the price of Norvir 400 percent in December.” [Source: Chicago Tribune , 8/5/04]
Bush administration refuses to enforce a law that could bring down the exorbitant price of this drug: Even though “consumer groups asked the NIH to ‘march in’ and let other companies make generic copies of Norvir before its patent expires, a power the government secured in 1980 under an law that has never been used,” the Bush administration refused. [Source: Chicago Tribune , 8/5/04]
"The government on Wednesday refused to override patents on the AIDS drug Norvir, effectively allowing a quintupling of the price to stand despite consumer groups' accusations of price gouging.” [Source: Associated Press, 8/5/04]
The American people have been STUCK with lousy deals lingering in our lives since the Bush/Cheney administration. We had to finally end the Iraq war, we are still lingering in Afghanistan, there was a global economic collapse which we are still recovering, we have extremists now in the USA Congress because Bush actually allowed church groups believe they would control the country to dissolve the wall between church and state and now the American people have to continue receiving blows to their own ambitions to own a home and receive a living wage from this profit scheme by the same lousy, corrupt administration.
To continue to prove the American people, especially women, have been under siege from the Bush years, I ran across a New York Times Magazine in my library the other day dated May 7, 2006. The front cover carried a red wrapper that is suppose to resemble that of a condom. The words written across the wrapper is "The War On Contraception." This bulloney never ends and the Right Wing intends to continue their assault as long as the American people will tolerate it while maintained ignorant of the progress they are making.
The Obama Administration becomes concerned about the 'anger level' within the nation. It isn't him exactly that Americans are angry with, it the CONTINUED oppression that lingers in our country. We don't want it. The TPP is just another lingering threat to the American Dream to maintain the anger of the people of this nation. The TPP will not help the USA economy and we all know it.
